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Wednesday, January 16, 2013

"Reports of the death of the printed book may be exaggerated."

So writes Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, in a recent WSJ piece. Carr writes:

Half a decade into the e-book revolution, though, the prognosis for traditional books is suddenly looking brighter. Hardcover books are displaying surprising resiliency. The growth in e-book sales is slowing markedly. And purchases of e-readers are actually shrinking, as consumers opt instead for multipurpose tablets. It may be that e-books, rather than replacing printed books, will ultimately serve a role more like that of audio books—a complement to traditional reading, not a substitute.

How attached are Americans to old-fashioned books? Just look at the results of a Pew Research Center survey released last month. The report showed that the percentage of adults who have read an e-book rose modestly over the past year, from 16% to 23%. But it also revealed that fully 89% of regular book readers said that they had read at least one printed book during the preceding 12 months. Only 30% reported reading even a single e-book in the past year.

What's more, the Association of American Publishers reported that the annual growth rate for e-book sales fell abruptly during 2012, to about 34%. That's still a healthy clip, but it is a sharp decline from the triple-digit growth rates of the preceding four years.

However, the Pew Research Center survey (from Dec. 27, 2012) that Carr cites is titled, "E-book Reading Jumps; Print Book Reading Declines", which begs the question: is this a glass half full/half empty conversation? Lee Rainie and Maeve Duggan, the authors of the survey, state: